Check how many shader variants you have

You can use logging and profiling tools to check how many shader variants Unity compiles, and identify ways you can remove (strip) variants to improve build times and reduce memory usage. You can do the following:

• Get a list of shader variants the Editor uses
• Get a list of shader variants Unity creates at build time
• Get a list of shader variants Unity compiles at runtime
• Check how much memory shaders use at runtime
• Highlight missing shaders at runtime

Get a list of shader variants the Editor uses

You can generate a list of shader variants that the Editor uses in the Scene view and the Game view. To do this:

1. Go to Edit > Project Settings > Graphics.
2. Under Shader Loading, you can see how many shaders and shader variants you have next to Currently tracked:.
3. Select Save to asset… to create a shader variant collection asset.

Get a list of shader variants Unity creates at build time

After you build your project, open the Editor.log log file and search for Compiling shader to see which variants Unity compiles and strips. For example:

Compiling shader "Universal Render Pipeline/Lit" pass "ForwardLit" (fp)
320 / 786432 variants left after stripping, processed in 6.77 seconds
starting compilation...
finished in 29.72 seconds. Local cache hits 202 (0.24s CPU time), remote cache hits 0 (0.00s CPU time), compiled 118 variants (582.41s CPU time), skipped 0 variants

If you’re using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), you can also log how many variants Unity compiles and strips in total. Select a logging level other than Disabled under Shader Stripping > Shader Variant Log Level in the following:

• The Universal Render Pipeline Asset if you’re using URP.
• The Global Settings Window if you’re using HDRP.

This adds Total logging to Editor.log. For example:

STRIPPING: Universal Render Pipeline/Lit (ForwardLit pass) (Fragment) - Remaining shader variants = 640/5760 = 11.11111% - Total = 2657/10169 = 26.12843%

See log files for the location of Editor.log.

Get a list of shader variants Unity compiles at runtime

1. Go to Edit > Project Settings > Graphics.
2. Under Shader Loading, enable Log Shader Compilation.
3. When you build your project, enable Development Build in the build settings.
4. In the Console Window, select Editor and enable Full Log [Developer Mode Only].
5. Start the application you built.

Unity prints a Compiled shader message in the Console Window when it compiles a shader for the GPU.

Check how much memory shaders use at runtime

Use the Memory Profiler module or the Memory Profiler package to check how much memory shaders are using at runtime. If a shader uses a lot of memory, you can experiment with stripping its variants.

Highlight missing shaders at runtime

In Unity 2022.2 and above, you can force Unity to show a pink error shader during runtime, when a Material tries to use a missing shader variant.

1. Go to Edit > Project Settings > Player.
2. Under Other Settings, in the Script Compilation section, select Strict shader variant matching.

You can also enable this in C# scripts using strictShaderVariantMatching.

When you do this, Unity shows a warning in the console with the missing variant and its keywords. You can use this during stripping to check you don’t remove shader variants your project needs.